No answer. He called again. Still no answer.
A summer breeze came traipsing out of the house and engulfed him in the
scent of roses. What kind of roses? he wondered. Green ones?
He stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him. He made his way
into the living room. The two chairs were gone, and so was the coffee
table. He walked through the living room and into the library; through
the library and into the dining room. The gasoline lantern burned
brightly on the dining-room table, its harsh white light bathing bare
floors and naked walls.
The breeze was stronger here, the scent of roses almost cloying. He saw
then that the double door that had thwarted him that morning was open,
and he moved toward it across the room. As he had suspected, it gave
access to the kitchen. Pausing on the threshold, he peered inside. It
was an ordinary enough kitchen. Some of the appliances were gone, but
the stove and the refrigerator were still there. The back doorway had an
odd bluish cast that caused the framework to shimmer. The door itself
was open, and he could see starlight lying softly on fields and trees.
Wonderingly he walked across the room and stepped outside. There was a
faint sputtering sound, as though live wires had been crossed, and for a
fleeting second the scene before him seemed to waver. Then, abruptly, it
grew still.
He grew still, too--immobile in the strange, yet peaceful, summer night.
He was standing on a grassy plain, and the plain spread out on either
hand to promontories of little trees. Before him, the land sloped gently
upward, and was covered with multicolored flowers that twinkled like
microcosmic stars. In the distance, the lights of a village showed. To
his right, a riotous green-rose bush bloomed, and beneath it Zarathustra
sat, wagging his tail.
Philip took two steps forward, stopped and looked up at the sky. It was
wrong somehow. For one thing, Cassiopeia had changed position, and for
another, Orion was awry. For still another, there were no clouds for the
moon to hide behind, and yet the moon had disappeared.
Zarathustra trotted over to where he was standing, gazed up at him with
golden eyes, then headed in the direction of the lights. Philip took a
deep breath, and followed him. He would have visited the village anyway,
Zarathustra or no Zarathustra. Was it Pfleugersville? He knew suddenly
that it was.
* * * * *
He had not gone far before he saw a highway. A pair of headlights
appeared suddenly in the direction of the village and resolved rapidly
into a moving van. To his consternation, the van turned off the
thoroughfare and headed in his direction. He ducked into a coppice,
Zarathustra at his heels, and watched the heavy vehicle bounce by. There
were two men in the cab, and painted on the paneling of the truckbed
were the words, PFLEUGERSVILLE MOVERS, INC.
The van continued on in the direction from which he had come, and
presently he guessed its destination. Judith, clearly, was in the midst
of moving out the furniture she had been too sentimental to sell. The
only trouble was, her house had disappeared. So had the village of
Valleyview.
He stared at where the houses should have been, saw nothing at first
except a continuation of the starlit plain. Then he noticed an upright
rectangle of pale light hovering just above the ground, and presently he
identified it as Judith's back doorway. He could see through it into the
kitchen, and by straining his eyes, he could even see the stove and the
refrigerator.
Gradually he made out other upright rectangles hovering just above the
ground, some of them on a line with Judith's. All of them, however,
while outlined in the same shimmering blue that outlined hers, lacked
lighted interiors.
As he stood there staring, the van came to a halt, turned around and
backed up to the brightest rectangle, hiding it from view. The two men
got out of the cab and walked around to the rear of the truckbed. "We'll
put the stove on first," Philip heard one of them say. And then, "Wonder
why she wants to hang onto junk like this?"
The other man's voice was fainter, but his words were unmistakable
enough: "Grass widows who turn into old maids have funny notions
sometimes."
Judith Darrow wasn't really moving out of Valleyview after all. She only
thought she was.
Philip went on. The breeze was all around him. It blew through his hair,
kissed his cheeks and caressed his forehead. The stars shone palely
down. Some of the land was under cultivation, and he could see green
things growing in the starlight, and the breeze carried their green
breath to his nostrils. He reached the highway and began walking along
it. He saw no further sign of vehicles till he came opposite a large
brick building with bright light spilling through its windows. In front
of it were parked a dozen automobiles of a make that he was unfamiliar
with.
He heard the whir of machinery and the pounding of hammers, and he went
over and peered through one of the windows. The building proved to be a
furniture factory. Most of the work was being done by machines, but
there were enough tasks left over to keep the owners of the parked cars
busily occupied. The main manual task was upholstering. The machines cut
and sewed and trimmed and planed and doweled and assembled, but
apparently none of them was up to the fine art of spitting tacks.
* * * * *
Philip returned to the highway and went on. He came to other buildings
and peered into each. One was a small automobile-assembly plant, another
was a dairy, a third was a long greenhouse. In the first two the
preponderance of the work was being performed by machines. In the third,
however, machines were conspicuously absent. Clearly it was one thing
to build a machine with a superhuman work potential, but quite another
to build one with a green thumb.
[Illustration]
He passed a pasture, and saw animals that looked like cows sleeping in
the starlight. He passed a field of newly-sprouted corn. He passed a
power plant, and heard the whine of a generator. Finally he came to the
outskirts of Pfleugersville.
There was a big illuminated sign by the side of the road. It stopped him
in his tracks, and he stood there staring at its embossed letters:
PFLEUGERSVILLE, SIRIUS XXI
_Discovered April 1, 1962
Incorporated September 11, 1962_
Philip wiped his forehead.
Zarathustra had trotted on ahead. Now he stopped and looked back. _Come
on_, he seemed to say. _Now that you've seen this much, you might as
well see the rest._